If the Black Death ever resurfaces, one hopes it won’t happen in Frankfurt. Or Atlanta. Not because those cities are the best in the world — Toronto is, right? — but because they are the most connected cities on the planet.

Michael Markieta has produced a series of stunning maps that show every flight path in the entire world. Frankfurt Airport travelers can choose from 250 unique destinations, while Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport​ ​comes in second, at 219 destinations.

Toronto Pearson International Airport ranks 17th in the world, with 156 destinations.

“If something like SARS broke out in Atlanta, it would be devastating,” Markieta said.

And diseases do travel, piggybacking inside people as they travel around the globe. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, for example, came to Toronto via jet from people infected in south China.

It would be better if the Black Death broke out in Sibu, Malaysia, whose airport has only six. Markieta says more than 2,000 airports have only one destination.

The 23-year-old recently graduated from Ryerson University’s geographic analysis program, which is where he first had the mapping idea.

He’s consulting with Arup on the project, which he hopes can benefit researchers analyzing the spread of communicable diseases.

“The maps really speak to globalization,” Markieta said. “Political boundaries are just arbitrary. This shows how everyone in the world is connected in one way, shape or form.”

Markieta began working on the project about a year ago in his spare time. He learned about openflights.org, an open-source project that collects data from private agencies, consultants and the general public on flight routes.

So he compiled departure and arrival information, or “origin-destination pairs” to use the language, and mapped it out using Geographic Information System.

He used the shortest distance between airports, which is “fairly representative of flight paths that don’t deviate much from the shortest route.”

Then he exported the map data to a graphics program, using colour coding: light blue for short routes, to a darker shade of blue for longer trips. The brighter the route, the more common the flight path.

The end result looks like a Rorschach test for the digital age.

When told by the Star the maps were beautiful, the straight-shooting Markieta responded, “Uh-huh.”

By continent, the most connected cities are Atlanta, Sao Paolo, Beijing, Sydney, Cairo and Frankfurt.

Markieta will be taking his skills back to Ryerson in the fall, where he’ll begin working on his master’s degree in the spatial analysis program.

And he’ll probably make some more sweet maps.

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